Investor and His Hedge Fund Are Rocked by Sex Assault Allegations

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The reason, it noted with perhaps extreme understatement, was that it had “become clear that some investment management activities of the partnership are affected by recent events.” In a sign that investors were losing confidence in the company, Odey Asset Management said it would shut down one of its funds and had halted investors from withdrawing their money from others, after what the firm described as “a sizable level of redemption requests.” In the hedge fund world, such a move, known as “gating,” is considered a drastic step meant to avoid the equivalent of a run on the bank. Those events were kicked off, on June 8, by a nearly 7,900-word investigation in The Financial Times, in which 13 women said Mr. Odey had assaulted or abused them — at his firm’s opulent offices in Mayfair, in his London townhouse and at his country mansion in western England. The likely dissolution of Odey marks a reckoning for its founder, who stood out from London’s pinstriped financier crowd with an aristocratic swashbuckler image and a willingness to take counterintuitive bets that made him lots of money. In an Odey-esque flourish, he quoted an Italian expression, “Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca,” or “The morning has gold in its mouth,” to the BBC on the day after the Brexit referendum. He was acquitted by the presiding judge, who told him, “You leave this courthouse with your good character intact.” Since then, Mr. Odey and his firm appeared to be poised for a recovery: Its flagship fund made a 152 percent return last year, in large part because of his highly profitable bets against British government bonds, roiled by the short-lived economic policies introduced by his former employee, Mr. Kwarteng.

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